


Inquisition Drabbles

by misslonelyhearts



Category: Dragon Age, Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: F/F, F/M, Gen, M/M, Other
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-09-06
Updated: 2014-07-18
Packaged: 2017-12-25 19:48:32
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 11
Words: 8,131
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/956941
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/misslonelyhearts/pseuds/misslonelyhearts
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>a collection of the bits and pieces of fic i'm writing in the lead-up to the release of Dragon Age: Inquistion.  the chapters aren't strictly connected. . .just moments inspired by concept art and game-play demos we've seen so far.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Alone Togther

For a person so bent on direct interrogation, she had an unnerving talent for not-asking in exactly the right way.  The Silent Plains had nothing on her.  Even as their crossing left the party dusted and sweating Cassandra’s back remained straight, and her stern-lipped  _waiting_  became a challenge.  Hours of their quiet clip-clopping along loosened truths Varric hadn’t intended to tell, leading him to talk by nothing more than pointed indifference. In another life, the Seeker would have been a brilliant biographer.    
  
Outside Trevis she hacked the staff-arm straight off of a mage who burst at them, hollering and wild-eyed, from behind an overturned cart.  One hand still easing Bianca from his back, Varric watched the man writhing in the tall grass.  
  
"Why is it always feathers and flames?"  He rubbed his chin.  
  
Cassandra didn’t answer, which was just another way to not ask.  
  
At the great stone bridge to Weisshaupt they crossed under a sign that should have read ‘Anderfels’ and Varric squinted up at it. The pointed end, the direction, had been broken off leaving ‘Anderf’.  As they passed, Varric cleared his throat.  Cassandra’s head swiveled away and her horse never broke stride.

She didn’t ask.  
  
Somewhere in the Merdaine, with sand in his boots and flies everywhere else, Varric could take no more.  Secrets, the bad ones, were a lonely fucking business for a dwarf with no clientele.  
  
"For seven years he was there, but just barely," Varric said, watching Cassandra lean forward with something approaching predatory delight.  The campfire softened her, though, and he almost smiled at how impossible that seemed.  He spread his hands.  "To understand where they went, you’ve got to know where they were from the start."  
  
She nodded.  "Kirkwall."  
  
"Yes. No," he rubbed the thin skin inside the corners of his eyes, as if it would enliven the cliche he was about to spin. "They were in-"  
  
"But, they did leave together," she said, louder than strictly necessary.   _Stones_  but he hated editors.  
  
Varric waved at the flies curiously milling about his mouth.   _Alone, together, inseparable._   Blocking wasn’t just shoving your characters around where they ought to be, and Cassandra’s type always managed to forget just how much of a crowd they were mucking with.    
  
Though he was years beyond that habit, Varric knew the feeling all too well.  After a moment he nodded.  ”That they did.”


	2. Les Conneries

"Look, Fancy, I’ve traveled with a few heroes," Varric started, gracing Vivienne with his customary and wholly unprompted expertise.  He flung his bundle into the space behind the rear seat and turned to her. "And I’ve learned not to ask  _why_  the special amulet of specialness has to be in a hidden lair, locked away under piles of animated corpses and homicidal spiders.”  He smoothed a hand over his receding hairline.  ”It’s just quicker to do it and be done.”  
  
A less convincing argument Vivienne had never heard.

Cassandra stopped unpacking her horse and turned to him.

"Spiders?"

"Oh yeah! Big as my-"

"I won’t," Vivienne said.  They stared at her, blinking in the silence she’d created.  "There must be another way. I will not get in that thing."

Cassandra waved toward the white, interminable haze beyond the tree, where even the end of the jetty had lost its shape.

"It is only a few hundred-"

"You don’t know that," replied Vivienne, her voice climbing.  "The fog.  It could go on for miles."

They would be lost and circling, at the whim of the water.   _Maker_ , even the Fade was navigable, but this…  
  
“You will be safe,” Cassandra assured her.  And though Vivienne trusted very few people, whether they wore armor or not, she knew that the Seeker’s virtue lay in something infinitely more substantial than decorative confidence.  Falsity eluded her.  It was trait both annoying and endearing.  In palpable contrast, there was the dwarf.  Vivienne looked down at Varric.

He rocked the boat with both hands, its curved sides kissing the foamy water, “See? Solid as stone. Though…” The remainder of the comparison died on his lips.  
  
Vivienne’s chest felt leaden.

"C’est des conneries!" she blurted, voice echoing into the mist.  Cassandra’s head whipped around.  Vivienne put a hand over her mouth, Edmonde’s pinched and disapproving face suddenly lapping at her mind like the gray waves on the bank.

Varric sat with his elbows drawn over his knees, scratching amusedly at his chest.  Vivienne promised herself that if he cracked the tiniest hint of a joke at her expense she would curse him bald from scalp to toes.  She refused to accept any of it, the lake the boat, the cruelty of circumstance.

But Cassandra went about the preparations as if Vivienne hadn’t objected at all.  She loaded everything they could carry, snatching Vivienne’s staff from her fingers and laying it alongside sword and crossbow in the belly of the boat.  When it was packed, Cassandra placed a steadying foot on the gunwale and, to Vivienne’s charmed surprise, gestured gallantly to her.

Stepping toward the proffered hand, Vivienne took a deep breath.  With a tight nod, and an iron grip on those gauntleted fingers, she stepped into the boat and collapsed onto the seat beside Varric.  The wood was damp, her boots sloshed in the sludge beneath them, and the boat gave a sickening roll from side to side. Vivienne grimaced as if touched by a demon.  She gulped back obscenities rising like bile in her throat.

Within moments, the jetty disappeared beyond their minimal wake.  The oars dipped again and again,  and their rhythm with the water was broken by unseen birdcalls somewhere across the lake.  Opalescent mist swallowed them whole and made Vivienne’s skin ripple with chill bumps, while Varric leaned back calmly and stretched his short legs out into the footwell.

"I could not agree more," Cassandra said quietly, gripping the oars like a pair of hatchets. "This is bullshit."


	3. Beefy

The sound of a great, dark whistling roused Varric from what might have been a passable attempt at a good night’s rest.  If not for the rocks under his blanket, and the sour sweat forever pooling in every damned crevice of his body, it would have been tolerable by apocalyptic standards.   _Stones_  he hated the outdoors.  The whistling went on, an elongated whirring punctuated by the briefest shuffle of heavy feet, and then a grunt.  
  
Varric sat up and felt his scalp prickle at the fresh air it was allowed to breathe at last.  Across the camp on the tallest cliffside outcrop, silhouetted against the rising sun, stood their resident bull of iron.  The Qunari was bare-chested, as always, and had finally perfected his disdain for common cultural acceptance by shedding his breeches.  His massive back writhed with muscles that howled to be set loose at any moment. Other parts of him were similarly bulgy and glistening.  And swinging.  Varric groaned.  The Qunari went on with the show, his horns throwing long shadows as he ran through practiced poses with his big sword…thing.  
  
“Hey, Beefy, d’you mind doing that at a more reasonable hour?” Varric said, voice gravelly from sleep, “And somewhere  _else_ _._ ” He turned to Cassandra, who ignored everything and everyone and instead stared at the coffee faintly steaming over the fire. “Has he been doing that since before dawn?”  
  
“ _Yes_ _,_ ”  Vivienne and the Inquisitor replied together, emphatically. Varric whipped his head around to find them leaning against one another, arms crossed, their appreciation of the whole scene radiating brighter and hotter than the morning sun now beaming fully across the valley.  Varric glared at them.  
  
“Maintaining bodily precision is a demand of the Qun,” said the Bull.  He swung his gargantuan blade in a broad, controlled arc, and looked over his sweat-streaked shoulder at Varric.  “Accommodating your modesty is not.”  
  
Modest?  Varric snorted and scratched his chest.  
  
He’d never been accused of something so vulgar.


	4. In the Rift

  
(art by[ verabai ](http://verabai.tumblr.com/post/60228410950/is-it-hot-in-here-or-is-it-just-them-some)on tumblr)  
  
  
In the mountain rift, choking down the Fade’s green haze, they’d been stuck between a rock and a non-place.    
  
She was unused to being cornered -no shield, armor gone- and all practical resistance had dissolved within moments of breaching the threshold. What had the First Enchanter warned her about spirits?  Everything was a shape of your own making, teased from your mind by curious entities.    
  
Curiosity had grown the wrong kind of horns, though, and reached with too-familiar lips.   _You cannot guard against yourself_ , Vivienne had said,  _and they will exploit it flagrantly._  
  
When it was done, the rift closed behind them in a furious flash of light, Cassandra felt her armor’s weight slide back like the grasp of an old friend.  What lingered, however, was the bright memory of skin, salted and hot, in the precise shape of a mouth on her own.   Without a word, they moved on.  The Inquisitor walked ahead, toward the looming Keep, white hair damp and her staff firm against the broken stone road.  
  
Cassandra shivered for the second time that day.  
  
As they passed through the gate, the party murmured about the Fade like the aftermath of an unwelcome storm; How they’d fumbled, and what they’d suffered.  Varric dumped his pack and stretched, spine cracking enviably.    
  
“Lost you for a while in there, Seeker,” he said.  ”Care to explain?”  
  
The Inquisitor turned and gave her an expectant look, something between a mock and a hard face.   
  
“I was tempted,” said Cassandra.  “Let us leave it at that.”


	5. Ceci n'est pas une chat

At the end of another day like too many they’d already had, Varric went around the outside of the Keep’s walls to smoke a pipe that no one knew he had.  Desert wind threatened to carry away half his tobacco, laced with elfroot like someone had once recommended.  But he packed the pipe well enough despite the elements and stuck his fingers deep into his pocket to scrounge for a match. Across the dry gully surrounding the Keep, the black cat who sunned herself like an Antivan queen lifted her head and blinked at him. And as he did every day, Varric nodded to her.

“Rough day for you, too, huh?”  

She flicked her tail and meowed. The wind spurred up, fluffing her fur so the setting sun could paint it auburn.

He smoked too deeply, and the brownish ache of it in his chest made him cough once.

“Here,” he said, and produced from his pack the dried meat he’d lied about forgetting to eat. “Something tells me you need it more than I do.”

The cat rose, stretched, sniffed and narrowed her golden eyes at him.  But she came across the empty riverbed and met Varric in the shadow of the wall.  Lightly, she licked his glove and butted him in the knee, rubbing and purring all the while.

“There’s no need for courting, you know,” Varric said. “You’re getting the food anyway.”

She meowed.  Varric marveled at her perfect, white teeth.  The cat took his offering and trotted away with it, a petite shadow of a hunter turned refugee on the fringe of a wasteland fortress.

He puffed his pipe, clamping it between his teeth.  “Where do you run off to, you little minx?”

The answer was in the adventure of her, the ritual, instinctual delving, and Varric had forgotten that joy seventeen times that day and twenty the day before.  So he followed the cat.

Halfway around the Keep’s broken, indecisive wall, she led him down into a narrow crevice between the dwarf-hewn stone and the desert rock.  There in the cool hideaway he watched her drop his charity at the edge of a squirming, snoring pile of kittens. . .and one runty nug.

“Sweetheart,” he said, looking down at the cat, “I think you’ve spent a little too much time in the sun.”

He set Bianca on the ground and lowered himself into the warren until the desert and the Keep were over his head, moreso than usual.

“Well, this is just heartbreak waiting to happen,” said Varric, licking his cracked lips.  He clenched his teeth around the pipe again and reached across the kittens to remove the nuglet.  

Mrrroaow, the cat wailed.

Varric stopped, his fingers resting where the orphaned nuglet’s heart beat steadily in sleep. Its pink, pale eyelids remained closed.  He looked over at the cat, now just a plaintive pair of eyes and silvery whiskers in the semidark.  She had a job, one to which she was uniquely, if damnably entitled.  Varric drew on his pipe and exhaled a plume of acceptance.  Heartbreak was an animal’s birthright as much a man’s. . .or a dwarf’s.

“Stranger things have happened,” said Varric. And worse, far worse.  He tucked the nuglet back among its new siblings and puffed his pipe.  The cat headbutted him, and he was about to pet her when out along the wall came a shrill whistle.  Varric poked his head up through the fading wreath of smoke and over the edge of the warren.  

Several yards away, the Inquisitor waved at him.  Beside her was the Iron Bull, stretching his unbelievable bulk in the afterburn of sunset, and several paces ahead stood Cassandra with her eyes latched onto the horizon.  Varric dropped his pipe into his palm, stuffed it away, and waved back at them.

He crawled topside and re-settled Bianca on his back.

“Same time tomorrow, milady?” he said.

In her secret hole, the cat purred noisily.  Varric resisted the most natural instinct he still possessed and didn’t name her.


	6. Caravan

_I._

Vivienne had been the first to see them, banners of blue and goldweave gliding along the hills, bringing the heraldry of embroidered masks, four chevaliers with their armor like illuminated storybooks, and one lovely but miserable scribe bouncing in her saddle.  Cassandra had ridden out to meet them.  
  
 _Lady Sophie Géroux_ , read the translucent missive, wax-sealed and signed in the Empress’s own hand.  But Vivienne had doubted anyone knew the real hand from the false any more.  Lady Sophie would document the Inquisition and bring her findings back to Val Royeaux, to whomever had sent her in the first place.   
  
On the day following the Lady’s arrival, the Inquisitor set the party upon a contingent of red templars.  Red were the aravel peaks, too. The templars had found the Dalish easily enough, but hadn’t backed their brutality with any swiftness. With unremitting force, the Inquisition had stepped in.  
  
The elves who remained after the initial attack fought without armor or hesitation.  They streamed past Vivienne with bows and daggers, and cooking pots.  She looked for Cassandra through the screaming fog of blood, the split-bone agony, listening for the Seeker’s signature beat of sword and shield, and instead found unmoved chevaliers and the wide-eyed figure of Lady Sophie among the trees. An Orlesian rose threatened by brambles.  
  
She sat on her horse, ashen and tremulous, but writing, writing, writing on a board balanced across the pommel while the sickening tide of steel and burnt wood lapped closer.  Errant arrows cracked the tree bark beside her and Lady Sofie flinched hard, striking ink across the page before dumping the board, parchment and all, into the dirt.  The board lay beside a severed hand, smallish and cleanly cut, and Vivienne knew that the Lady would die before she’d dismount for her tools now.    
  
In moments it was over.  The Inquisitor destroyed every templar, razed them like a frontiersman clearing a plot, and took neither prisoners nor loot.  It was, Vivienne thought looking at the battered camp, the very least they could do.  And the least of everything was the problem in every corner of the Inquisition.  It made any great advancement impossible. Vivienne used her lace-trimmed hankie to blot the sweat and Maker knew what else from her face, and went to Varric where he sagged beside a ruined halla pen.  
  
“You missed the first few times we did this,” Varric said, addressing Lady Sophie as she appeared across the clearing.   “It’s not Exalted, but at least there’ll be marching.”  
  
“The Inquisition is sanctioned to escort  _elves_?” Lady Sophie said.  She gathered her skirts, sat on a large rock, and drew her board and parchment back into her lap.  Vivienne wondered if she’d had her guards reclaim them for her. “Lord Tethras, how many elves would you say have been relocated?”  
  
 _Lord Tethras_.  Vivienne felt her lips twitch.  
  
Beside the broken wheel of an aravel, the Iron Bull snorted and nudged Cassandra.  Though sweat-streaked and spattered with bits of gore, they were not too tired to smile at Varric.  
  
“Lady, I’m no Lord.  One day I might tell you why,” he said, rising with Vivienne’s help. “But you didn’t bring enough parchment.”  
  
He shrugged his duster back into place, kicking off a cloud of dirt as heavy as a sigh held long past its time.  
  
“Save your questions for now, we’ll be traveling a while still,” Vivienne said to Lady Sophie. In Orlesian, she added, “ _I suggest you use that time to come up with better ones_.”  
  
Lady Sophie swallowed lightly and nodded, respectful, possibly for the first time in her life.  Without makeup she was easier to read than most Orlesians, and more troublesome for it.  There was a time when Vivienne could have known Lady Sophie very well, or not at all.  She missed many of the inscrutable aspects of Val Royeaux, but not that one.  Leaving the Lady scribe to her writing, Vivienne again turned her lyrium-thrumming body back to the work at hand.  
  
The halla had been slaughtered, down to the last Matrinalis fawn.  Their blood wet the early-fallen needles on the forest floor, wending its way down the slope toward the stacked bodies of the templars who’d butchered them.  Vivienne’s knuckles ached, clenched around her staff.   _Void take the_ _connards_.  Fire was too sweet for them, she decided, and thought of the wolves who would claim them instead.  But the halla…  
  
“Rig as many horses as you can,” said the Inquisitor, smothering Vivienne’s rising rage with a tattered wool voice. “Mine, too. Whichever are calm enough to take a harness and collar.”  
  
Within the quiet of an hour they had the Dalish packed, what little of their families and possessions could be salvaged, and together they labored through the forest like a bunch of overturned stones.  Vivienne relinquished her horse, a creature who’d always sensed her lack of mastery anyway, and walked beside the clan’s Keeper.  The old elf had a staff, ancient but newly splintered, and wore faded vallaslin that had once been green as the pines.   
  
“ _Lath aravel ena_ ,” the Keeper murmured to herself.  A broken song, it seemed to Vivienne.  
  
The odd caravan of elves and Inquisition soldiers slogged mournfully out of the woods into the harsh sun.  And as they had throughout the brief battle, the chevaliers kept their mounts, while Lady Sophie went on scribbling from behind the safety of their shining rank.  
  
 _II._

The last time Vivienne had ridden a horse she’d been in braids, with jam and crumbs around her mouth, and the Circle had been two years off.    
  
Riding was no great loss.  
  
She walked the narrow cut the aravels made in the meadowgrass, and was cooled in the shadow of the Iron Bull, who never required a horse, nor rest, nor anything but ale and Varric’s bawdy stories.  He held his arms out for the elven children, those that were still able to play, and swung them to giggling and perilous heights as everyone plodded along in the heat.  
  
Lady Sophie approached, slowing her horse beside Vivienne.   
  
“First Enchanter, it occurs to me that bringing these Dalish under the protection of the Inquisition will strain resources,” she said  “They are nomads, can’t they be allowed to do as they already know?”  
  
Vivienne looked up at her, at the loosening hair around her face and the creeping crust of mud at the hem of her fine cloak.  
  
“You’d have them take their chances, is that it?”  
  
There was a stiffening in her arms, a drawing in, but Lady Sophie went on.  She bent a little in her saddle, as if to share a secret that Vivienne suspected truly wasn’t much of one.  
  
“They’re not without skill or tradition,” Lady Sophie said.  She waved a gloved hand, still holding her reins. “Why, I saw mothers and children fending off templars with nothing more than a bit of hedge magic.”  
  
“Skill and tradition,” Vivienne repeated.  Lady Sophie was a hundred familiar faces, her accounts written in a chorus of voices devoid of harmony.  And Vivienne knew her kind as intimately as the taste of her own bile. There was no  _un_ knowing it.  Her feet ached, and her heart, and they kept pounding on, covered in filth.  “Mothers and children should not have to defend themselves. Not ever.  Not even  _elves._ ”  
  
She fixed her gaze as pointedly as her exhaustion would allow.  Lady Sophie’s eyes followed.  
  
Inside the nearest wagon, head lolling with the every bump of the wheels, was the owner of the lost hand.  A beautiful boy, with slender ears and a fine nose.  The deep crimson sail of the aravel shadowed his face, and between his knees he cradled the stump of his arm.  
  
“You’re right.  Of course.”  Her horse continued at a swaying gait and Lady Sophie was quiet for a moment.  Then she asked, “Where will they be taken?”  
  
At the head of their twisting line of wagon wheels and horses, the Inquisitor sat in the buckboard of the lead aravel, pouring over a well-creased map.   
  
“No safe places remain,” replied Vivienne, “and the evil we fight fears no magic…nor sovereignty.” Squinting in the sunlight made it feel like a smirk.  It could have been.  
  
Lady Sophie didn’t approach her again until they made camp.    
  
 _III._  
  
Limp as a tulip stem, carrying a wretched gift of halla horns, the Inquisitor entered the party’s expansive main tent and joined Cassandra on the floor without a word to anyone.  Vivienne had heard their funerary songs before, but the elves outside the tent didn’t chant or lift their voices above a soft moan. She looked away. Some horrors were beyond the rituals of grief.  In the Circle it had always been that way.   
  
“You’ve seen your first real taste of the Inquisition, my lady,” she said, pouring tea for Lady Sophie after her own cup, and Varric’s, were full.  “Which details will survive the journey back to Val Royeaux?”  
  
Lady Sophie stopped her work, a sketch of the old Keeper, and set her quill on its gilded rest.    
  
“I think these elves, these  _people_  are remarkable,” she said, studying Vivienne’s face too openly. “Her Imperial Majesty has much to learn from them.  As do we all.”  
  
“You believe so?” said Vivienne.  
  
“Indeed,” Lady Sophie replied with somber insistence, but hesitated to cast too broadly about the tent for approval.  Her eyes settled on Varric, across from her on their shared table.  “What about you, Lord Tethras?”  
  
Vivienne waited for him to correct her again, but he only paused his writing.  
  
“Me?“ Varric said.  His spectacles drooped as he looked past Lady Sophie, through the tent flap, to the stricken aravels with their thin campfire smoke.  Vivienne watched his quill tip tremble, ink spreading on the page like a glyph.  He went back to his slowly looping characters and muttered, “I think war’s a shitty time to start learning about a place you’ve never been before.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> special thanks to jkateel for lending a little beta help on this one.


	7. Fuck the Fade

The Seeker warned him every ten minutes as they crept through the mist-shrouded cave.  He could have set a water clock by the regularity of her voice behind him.   _Do not trust your senses in this place, dwarf._  
  
He was old enough to know better, and dwarven enough to retain that helpful incredulity, too.  But Varric’s reason evaporated, eaten away by the clearing of the incessant fog that revealed a lone figure struggling at the edge of a vast cave pool.  
  
 _Hawke._   Battling back a trio of flaming demonlings, she’d lost a dagger in the water but came out on top like always, planting a backup blade in the closest demon’s throat. Varric had Bianca humming in his hands, singing old songs, before the last creature even knew he was there.  When she caught her breath, Hawke looked across the rocky slope at him.  
  
“Mother always complained I had too many friends in low places,” she said, mopping sweat from her forehead.  Varric chuckled.  
  
As Cassandra jogged down to the shore, Hawke stood back on her heel and looked her over, nudging Varric with an elbow.  “Working on a new biography?  Something about fruitless hero-searching while mages and templars slap each other like grumpy siblings?”  
  
Still tall, still quick, still that smile like an apology for whatever was coming after it. Hawke bore silver banners of a harder time at her forehead and temples, and she’d lost most of the fourth finger on her right hand.  She was the best thing he’d seen in a dog’s age.  
  
Varric squeezed her hand warmly, and Hawke closed her eyes, making a sound like coming home after a long day.  Bugger his senses.  He was old enough.  He turned to Cassandra with a grin.  
  
“Well, Seeker, how does it feel to finally have the answer to the hottest question in Thedas?”  
  
Cassandra said nothing.  She stood with her mouth gone thin and a hand on the pommel of her blade.  
  
“Meet your number one fan, Hawke,” said Varric with a gallant gesture. Still, Cassandra was quiet, eyes glinting with a chartreuse shade of. . .was that _pity_? Varric crossed his arms. “Don’t be shy, ask her for an autograph.”  
  
Hawke laughed tightly and ran a hand through her shaggy hair.  
  
“You know exactly where the Champion is, Varric,” Cassandra said.  He hated that she towered and blockaded and leveled him at every turn.  He hated the damp softness of her voice.  “Of all your lies this one discredits you most.”  
  
But he couldn’t be exploited if he was doing the same, right?  Varric took both of Hawke’s hands, felt the missing space of her finger and the weight of her, and said, “There’s a special torture chamber in the Void reserved for spoilsports, Seeker.”  
  
“Enough.”  
  
Cassandra thrust her sword clean through Hawke’s back with barely a grunt for the effort.  Varric stared at the tip of the weapon, its point accusing him from the center of her chest. Instead of blood, puke-colored fog boiled out of the wound and Varric’s mouth flooded with bitter salt at the sight and smell of it.    
  
He shouted, “NO,” and lunged to catch Hawke’s limp body.  But inside, under her false skin, she flashed briefly with thousands of little lights, winking like stars, before she vanished altogether.  Only the fog remained and, behind it, Cassandra.

Varric charged her.

“Damn you!” His shoulder yowled louder than he did when it collided with Cassandra’s armor. “Maker take your blighted eyes, you sack of shit!” His boots rooted in the gravel, his fists aimed for a kidney or an old wound. “I’ll tear you in half!”  
  
But he’d never been good at hand-to-hand, the kind that didn’t involve trading money or favors, and Cassandra knew it.  Stones, she’d been at his back long enough. With an ungraceful kick, she took his legs out from under him, jerked his shoulders back, and threw him to the ground.   Sweating in that unnatural humidity, they breathed hard at one another, less a dare to go on with a stupid fight than a quiet plea for peace. The permanent kind.   
  
Varric lay on the unfinished idea of a cave floor, the heat of his rage and bitterness prickling as it abandoned him.  Everything hurt.  Every sodding thing. He’d never felt so much like a dwarf.  With that magic mist still teasing his throat, Varric’s voice was hoarse.  He muttered, “fuck the Fade,” and got to his feet with a hand from Cassandra.  
  
She looked away, toward the greenly glittering slit that might be their exit, or their end.  
  
“Agreed.”


	8. Wond

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> this drabble doesn't feature any major companions. just a couple of possible NPCs down on their luck.

SCENE:   _Somewhere just outside of Val Chevin, well off the Imperial Highway, a pair of apostate elves live in a grotty little camp under a vine-choked bridge.  If this were another sort of time and place, their temporary abode would have been the ideal place to find trolls or the odd, forgotten skeleton clutching an old map.  As it is, though, it’s just a camp for some luckless elves on the run from pretty much everything and everyone in Thedas.  We find wiry, just-shy-of-handsome Evon there, soured by cold and hunger, waiting beside the fire as dusk creeps close.  He’s watching, keeping worry at bay with a dose of self pity while he looks for Lucy’s return along the road from the city._  
  
  
Just as the sun packed it in behind the trees, Lucy appeared. She rode poor Colin down the embankment and his dodgy little hooves slipped in the dead leaves.  Evon lurched up off the log, nearly as chuffed to see the donkey as his Luce.  Almost.  She was cheerful enough, swinging her leg over to hop down, but something was off about the look of her.  See someone every day and the simplest of things, out of place, can seem so-  
  
If it’d been a snake, it would have bitten him.  But then, he wouldn’t be looking for a snake.  
  
“Here, where’s the staff?”  
  
Lucy held up a dirty finger.  She reached into her belt and pulled out a smooth little stick, oiled yellowood and no longer than a carving knife.  
  
“Traded it for this.”  
  
“What’s that?” he said, intrigue ranking just slightly above his ratcheting anxiety. Maybe it was someone’s heirloom.  
  
“A wand!”  
  
“A what?”  Evon felt the blood leave his cheeks.  She’d been taken.  
  
“The old shopkeep said it’ll be all the rage soon,” said Lucy. She twirled it between her fingers.  Evon adored Lucy, from her birdy toes to her pointed ears, but every so often he wanted to bash his own head in for it.  
  
“Are you barking?” He thrust his hands through the thinning hair on either side of his head, and would have torn it out were it not so precious to him.  “That staff cost more’n Colin and the wagon together!”  
  
“Yeah, well the shaft was splint after you botched the mugging, so,” she said with a shrug. “No more staff.  We’ll share this instead.”  
  
Lucy handed it to him with a hopeful smile.  It wasn’t even pretty (the stick, not her smile, which he invariably enjoyed.)  
  
His staff had been almost posh, admirable in the right light, until the blighted beardy fellow had cracked it over his knee and then laughed at them.  Of all the luck. They’d ambushed a bloody bone fide hero, too polite to even be cross with them for trying.   
  
Evon thumbed the  _wond_. The thing had no clever focus crystal, not even a blade at the back end, just a simple lathing all around.  It could have come off a bannister.  On a whim, Evon sniffed it.  
  
“Go on, give it a flick,” Lucy said, dragging him over by the fire. “You won’t be sorry.”  
  
It didn’t feel half odd in his hand, balanced from his index finger to the center of his palm.  Ever the unbeliever, Evon looked at Luce askance, and she grinned up at him.  He pointed it at the soggy remnants of their campfire and conjured up a sparking spell.  
  
A white hot arc of flames shot out of the tip of the stick, drawing from his power like an unspooling thread.  It sizzled furiously when it hit the pile of wood.  Scorched splinters exploded out in rolling ball of fire.  Everything from the wood to the mossy stones and hanging ivy was burnt to a crisp. Colin wheezed and shuffled behind the tent.  
  
“ _Maker’s taint, Luce!_ ”  
  
“Right?”  
  
He stared at the bit of smooth wood in his palm as Lucy’s gleeful clapping faded into the back of his mind.  
  
The little magic stick made him suddenly, immeasurably angry.  No, Evon decided, a thing like that _could_ be measured.  His frustration could be poured out into bitter decades.  All those years with a staff as tall as his own self. All those years running around, hiding and failing miserably, knowing the alternative was hardly a choice at all. He’d had to strap it right to his back, obvious as dogs’ bollocks.  Only now was there an answer for it.  Of all the bleeding luck. The world was arse over teakettle, all manner of bastards and long-toothed crawlies were coming out of the woodwork, and it made no difference if you were a miner or a magister. But now, oh now he had a  _wand_.   
  
 _Fuck it all_ , he was about to say.  Instead, when Evon opened his mouth, a shrieking, thundering sound swallowed up the words, and force of it shook the bridge hard enough to loosen the mortar.  Lucy jumped to her feet, eyes full of fear.  Evon took her hand while the shrieking grew louder somewhere overhead, spreading to echo along the empty riverbed. Panic swirled into them as quick as breeze-blown leaves, and together they peered out from under the bridge.  
  
A great, gaping, green hole had stretched itself across the very air, like a ripped seam, just over the road to Val Chevin.  Behind him the donkey brayed, screamed really, and those dodgy hoofbeats thumped away.  But Evon didn’t look back.  He stood transfixed, not even sweating, as the pulsing light grew stronger.  The torn spot, like a maker-damned doorway to a dark patch of Nowhere, flooded the road with unnatural vapors.  He took a step toward the bank, their new wand held out before him like a torch.    
  
Lucy yanked his elbow.  
  
“Colin’s run off.”  
  
Evon stopped. The green mist surged down the bank, curling over boulders and ancient elm roots, slithering down and across the riverbed, almost seeking.  Of course, Evon nodded grimly to himself, their elusive and perpetually brief triumph would be snuffed again.  
  
“Wouldn’t be the first time he was smarter’n us, would it?”


	9. Nighthawking

Deepening shades of night sifted over high backed sand dunes. In the dark, the paralytic stillness of sleep numbed every stretch of the desert, from the wind to the croaking lizards in their holes. But there were always things creeping closer, bigger than the sunken sculptures in the sand. And they couldn’t wait for day.  
  
Varric sat smoking in the shadow of one of those gargantuan statues.  Its outstretched arm ended in a hand that gestured across the stars toward. . . _where? Orlais?_  His smoke drifted upward, his eyes downward.  Muffled voices and the scrape of metal on sandstone echoed below him.   
  
A makeshift ramp had been dug into the desert, studded at regular intervals by torches, it spiraled steeply into an excavation pit.  More torchlight glowed inside the mouth of the tomb, and the stone walls crawled with the shadows of Inquisition workers.  
  
With thinning enthusiasm for the prospect of sleep, Varric prepared to stow his pipe and make his way back to the tent.  It was a poor imitation of civilized lodging that promised flimsy flaps full of creepy crawlies in addition to a sleep roll full of sand. But as he turned, Varric spied a tall shape crossing the camp, heading for the dig site.    
  
Among a blended mash of tall shapes in his life, Varric had learned to spot Cassandra in the dark. It was odd, that familiarity. Or maybe a year of travel sometimes felt like ten when he was in her company.   
  
“Seeker.” Varric nodded as she passed him.  
  
“Dwarf.” Cassandra neglected to grace him with her usual narrow-eyed scrutiny.  Varric would have been offended if he hadn’t been as fully tired as she looked.  Her shoulders sagged as she descended.  
  
Again he took a step toward camp and felt the desert air shift behind him. A silent figure ambled up and Varric turned to see a sliver of the Inquisitor’s face come into the moonlight. She pulled her hood back and tilted her chin toward Cassandra, who navigated between workers muscling their carts up the ramp.  
  
“She’s spent the better part of this week overseeing the excavation.  Even at night.”  
  
“It’s a miracle we have anybody left.  They should have all withered and died of anxiety under that gaze,” replied Varric.  “Her interest in this particular hole in the ground is a little. . .intense.”  
  
“Is it? You know her better than I.” The Inquisitor leaned against the statue and tugged her gloves off.  If she’d been about to reveal what she’d been up to, creeping around camp in the dark, the moment had passed.  Varric took a preamble sort of breath.  
  
“Well, if I had to take some authorial liberties I’d say our dear Seeker isn’t wild about diddling the dusty old artifacts.” He puffed his pipe and nibbled the stem. “She is Nevarran, don’t forget.  As a culture, they don’t take kindly to what we’re doing here.”  
  
“What, archaeology?”  
  
“Graverobbing.”  
  
In their shared scrap of moonlight, the Inquisitor gave him a wry look.  She glanced down at her spread fingers where the Cadash ring dominated her hand. Varric crouched at the edge of the pit, watching the humans and elves moving around the tomb entrance.  
  
Whoever these industrious folks had been, even the long-dead people of a halfway intelligent civilization had to know, didn’t they, that nothing was sacred? That the luxury of outrage was foreit when they lost the last war, the last king, the last breath of the last blighted villager.   
  
He thought of his rooms back in the Hanged Man, and plans he’d neglected to make for their safe keeping.  Somewhere, every slip of parchment, every stick of furniture, a decade of memories from unwashed trousers to sooty bookbindings was someone else’s serendipitous bit of archeology now.  _Or worse_ _._     
  
Far below, he watched Cassandra stretch her back and settle in at a scholar’s table facing the tomb. She flagged down a worker trundling by with an oblong shape, and sent him back into the tunnel with it.  A gentle hand on his arm drew Varric’s gaze back to the Inquisitor.  
  
“Hey. Do you think that’s what we’re doing?” she said, sitting on the edge of the hole.  She stretched, too, short legs and smallish boots pointing at the horizon before she went to swinging them lazily against the ledge.  
  
“I have some experience scratching around for things that should stay buried,” said Varric.   _And being prematurely buried with them._  Once, he’d have shared a smile about it, instead he shook his head, sat heavily next her with his knees drawn up, and lied. “No, I don’t think that’s what we’re doing.”  
  
The Inquisitor took his pipe.  She inspected it as if it were a half-remembered face.   
  
“Shaperate would insist that it’s important to know the difference,” she said, and puffed from the slender pipestem. “Or care about the distinction.”   
  
Her smoke rose up, unhurried, and Varric looked down.  Beyond their dangling feet, so alike, past the swoop of the ugly ramp and the torches jabbed into sand, the excavation went on.  Cassandra slumped at the archaeologist’s table. Workers moved carts in and out, veering around her with the unhindered purpose of ants.  
  
“I’m told that  _delegating_  is one of the many glamorous perks of leadership,” said Varric. “There’s always someone to do all that pesky caring and distinguishing  _for_ you.”   
  
“Maybe.”  The Inquisitor took another puff of Varric’s pipe and passed it back to him.  “But if it were your dusty bones getting manhandled for the greater good wouldn’t you rather not be delegated?”  
  
“No one’s using any of my relics to save the world, boss,” said Varric.  _And no one left to be bothered either way._  
  
After a quiet moment, during which Varric thumbed his pipe and stared too long at the Inquisitor’s ring, she finally said, “It wouldn’t be right to let someone else shoulder that responsibility.”  
  
He chuckled mirthlessly and nodded down into the pit, at a pair of shoulders more than qualified for the job.  
  
“Don’t tell the Seeker that.”


	10. untitled

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> a drunken second person narrative departure from the norm. . .

you think it’s everything and everyone against you. not a tide. not a mountain. just the hot wind in every direction, blowing your hair in your face, sending grit in your mouth so you can’t taste anything that’s not bitter earth. you learn. you’re wise the way cactus is wise. the way nugs hide. the way water fills and falls. and you forget youth because it means fuckall to eternity.  
  
but even in this glowing circumstance, you’re slightly less than alone.  you love a dwarf, you think, in the blessed cooldark spaces between violence and tedium. that’s something, you think. and he thinks so, too.  
  
that’s something.   
  
there’s  _something_  increasing in your ache-worn places, illish green, absurd. it’s hot as hell and makes you loose.  _takes the edge off, dunnit?_  he says, and you’ll never look at a length of gold chain the same ever again.   _there’s no edges left on me_ , you say, while his elbows at your sides make a point you can concede.   
  
a dwarf loves you, more than gold, and more than the life it can buy in high places. he loves you like death loves red. like a seed sighs in thresh. his love is worse on the page because it’s his last, his only, honest work.   _one-of-a-kind_ , you hear, repeating, in hollow chambers of your mind. what’s a name with no mark? what’s faded brass, a bolt and splintered shaft, against the holler of the wind?  
  
there're weapons forged, steel in fire, and wickedness from Void knows where. none spark hard as you. you with your teeth a-flash and tongue gone numb around diplomacy. it’s no wonder his steps drag in your wake.   
  
because he’s never loved like it could save him, and you won’t believe it anyhow.


	11. Seed

The Belle Marché glittered with the fruit of a dozen nations, baubles pried from their homelier crowns and reset in an already elaborate market. Ruddy-faced cooks with their calloused hands sniffed and poked and haggled with merchants while frantic servants packed crates to order.    
  
In the market square there was a little blonde child with swollen mosquito bites spotting her chubby legs.   
  
On a sun-warmed bench, beside Val Royeaux’s hundredth gilded fountain, Sabin ate cherries from a sack and considered the girl’s splotchy skin. She stood in the shade of a nearby awning while a woman, presumably her mother, asked something of the merchant behind a display of toys. The child glanced around wet-eyed, now and then rubbing her legs together like a cricket. It must have been maddening, that itch.  
  
Sabin spat a pit into the cup of her fist, ate another cherry, and continued to watch.  
  
The mother and little girl came closer to Sabin, giving her a wide berth and a long stare before approaching an apothecary’s window that opened to the street.  The mother asked for a soothing balm. The apothecary pushed a jar of pulpy soaproot mash across the counter.  
  
It was the wrong choice. Sabin chewed her cherry flesh, rolling the seed until it was naked and hard against her teeth. She spat the pit into her fist.   
  
It wasn’t the skin needing relief, it was the blood; The surface only a symptom of the body’s inborn weakness.  As a child she’d suffered the same: her mosquito bites turning to hot, angry welts while other people got mild bumps the size of pinpricks. She’d learned to treat the cause, not the result.  Somehow the painted matriarchs of a nation so vast and fierce had yet to come to the same conclusion.  
  
Lady Josephine would likely tell her to keep such observations to herself at court.  
  
The mother plunked her coins down and swept the jar into the little girl’s hands.  The girl held it and looked back at Sabin, who tucked another cherry into her mouth and returned the stare.  
  
From Sabin’s left came the sound of shoes tapping like industrious birds on the pavestones, and a familiar voice.  
  
“It’ll just be a half hour at most. Her Majesty’s court is full today,” said Lady Josephine.   
  
Sabin stood. People stood when Lady Josephine entered, when she approached, when she left.  Sabin had declined to engage in most human pretenses, but after her third conversation with Lady Josephine she began to do so, as she did everything, because it pleased herself. It pleased her like honey on the comb to see the woman’s chin turn up as she craned to speak to Sabin’s full height.   
  
It pleased her that Lady Josephine minded the effort not one bit.    
  
She peeked at the bag in the crook of Sabin’s arm and said, “Oh, what have you got there?”  
  
“Cherries,” Sabin replied, shrugging, and spat another pit for accidental emphasis. “From who knows where.”  
  
She tipped the sack, and Lady Josephine took several with a delighted smile.  
  
Her waning interest in the little girl further diluted, Sabin barely watched the mother and child wander off into the crowd. She deposited her fistful of seeds into the small pouch at her hip.  Upon finishing her second cherry, discreetly removing the pits to her hand, Josephine gave a vague gesture toward the Imperial Palace.  
  
“Come inside and we’ll take advantage of royal hospitality while we wait.”  
  
“The smell of castles makes me nervous,” said Sabin.  Glancing down at Josephine’s head in the bright light, she added, “Go ahead if you’re uncomfortable. I will find you.”  
  
“Please, I enjoy the sun.” She slipped another cherry between her teeth.  
  
“It has its uses,” Sabin murmured, because sunlight loved crops of freckles and bronzed skin as much as grain fields and gates of gold.  
  
In deference to another human practice, she offered her elbow, and was gifted with another graceful smile from Josephine’s upturned face.  
  
Together they took a meandering walk toward the palace gates. Sabin, her habitual nature stoked by swollen mosquito bites, stooped to gather flowers, simple ingredients from the promenade’s overfull gardens.  Those passersby not occupied with themselves openly scrutinized Sabin.  She ignored them. Josephine, seeing her complete lack of concern for their fish-mouthed gawking, returned each pinched face with her own imperious brand of reproach.    
  
After just a little foraging, and more than a few tense glares from the omnipresent guards, Sabin held a small bundle of jewelweed, fennel and coneflower.  They grew unbothered, in plain sight, and cost nothing but a bended knee. The apothecary probably passed them every day on his way to the Belle Marché for work, a job to which he’d risen without any apparent proficiency.    
  
They passed through the Imperial gates and Josephine sighed, a pleasant spring-water sound. She ate another cherry. Sabin glanced back at the market.  Profiting from the free earth bothered her not at all.  False cures and false care, on the other hand. . . In the end, they all deserved their welts for that.   
  
But a simple trick of chaos had made an arbiter out of Sabin.  It might benefit Josephine to understand, before they climbed the imperial steps, that a survivalist made a poor diplomat for events of catastrophic import.  She looked away from the market. Josephine cleared her throat, chasing off Sabin’s internal counsel.  
  
“That’s an unusual bouquet you’ve made.”  
  
“They are the least unusual things about this place,” Sabin replied.  

Josephine’s dark eyelashes dipped as she leaned forward to smell the herbs.  

Sabin held them back. “Like it? I’ll trade you for it.”  
  
“You employ my own economic strategy against me, Inquisitor. I am so proud,” said Josephine. She stood back on her heel.  “What will you take? Some coppers?” She then added her best offer, as if it were an afterthought instead of her goal. “A kiss?”  
  
Sabin smiled with as much cool mystery as she could convey, and feathered a touch over Josephine’s small, loosely cupped fist.  
  
“These will do.”  
  
Josephine’s eyes narrowed, a shadow of disappointment flashing there, but she opened her fist and poured the bald cherry pits into Sabin’s waiting hand.  With the bouquet in her possession, a proper trade completed, Josephine looked less happy than Sabin would have liked, concerned when she should have been pleased. But Sabin enjoyed managing her intrigue.  
  
Josephine watched her jostle the pits together and said, “I’d like to ask what they are for, but-”  
  
“What is any seed for?” said Sabin, tucking Josephine’s cherry pits among the others collected in her belt pouch.  “A beginning and an end.”  
  
“Too true,” Josephine replied, voice distant and husky. Her eyes drifted from the pouch to some point beyond Sabin’s shoulder, likely the palace itself.   
  
As the impulse struck her, Sabin bent to kiss Josephine’s forehead, which was sun-warm and smelled of candlesmoke.  She rolled up the bag of remaining cherries, Josephine cradled her bouquet, and they continued toward the palace in silence.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thanks to flutie for the beta! <3


End file.
